 Ken Secretary asked for the slides so that we can start. Thank you. So very warm welcome to you all today to already second European Distance Learning Week webinar session. We already had very nice webinar this morning, so I hope this one will be even better. I'm very happy that this is the fourth year of the European Distance Learning Week. And during this week we have six webinars with 35 speakers, so I hope you will enjoy all the sessions. This year European Distance Learning Week is organized in collaboration with the United States Distance Learning Association. And as well we have special partner this year, Open Education Learning Association in Australia. So thanks them for supporting and joining us. Today's topic is challenges on the European and global level. Lots of challenges. During this webinar we will try to raise awareness and discussion on some of them. Certainly we cannot discuss on all of them. So please I ask all participants to be active in the chat, to ask questions, to comment. Also I ask my presenters as well to engage in the chat and reply on the comments and questions. I'm very happy that I have distinguished presenters today with me. Starting from Irina Volongevich-Yenev from Vitatus Magnus University, former Eden President and from Lithuania, and from the Lithuania Distance Learning Association. Then we have Jennifer Roberts, Vice President of Publication, officer from Open Distance Learning Association in Australia coming from South Africa. Then we have Dean Hook, U.S. DLA Board Member and President-Elect from America. With us today is also Jonathan Casano-Munos from European Commission Joint Research Center. Svetlana Knyazyva from UNESCO, Institutes of Information and Technology in Education. Also Eden Fellow and we have Sally Reynolds from AT&T in Belgium. So you see we are going Europe and global as well. And I hope that today's presentation will be of interest to us. Here are the topics and the questions regarding challenges which we will raise within our session. At the end, I ask all of you participants to point out which of the challenges do you find most important. And not to be long because we have quite a number of presenters and presentations. Very interesting one. I would like immediately to start with presentation also time. So I ask our first presenter, Irina Volngvichene, to give presentation on challenge, how to create and ensure good quality materials and courses from the point of online learning in higher education to distance education. Thank you very much, Sandra. I don't know if you are hearing me well. And then we start with the first question, which is an eternal question, I would say. But now is discussed in different aspects, different context, because one of the mergers that is happening now in Europe and globally is the merge of formal, non-formal and informal learning. And when we speak about quality, and when we speak about quality materials and courses as was defined by Sandra and organizers of this webinar, we have to take into consideration all of this. I decided to approach this question by three proposals, coming of course from three different continents that are in partnership or organizing of this week and this webinar in particular. The first example naturally comes from one of those from Australia. And when we reflect historically on the topic of quality assurance, we can be all confident that this is one of the topics that has been discussed longer than for two decades, for distance learning, for distance education, then for open learning, then for open online learning, and so forth. So people working in higher education naturally try to find the roots of the discussion in research. One of the most cited also for discussing on different different aspects that are naturally related with the quality of learning, quality of learning environment and also teaching and learning, what I specifically like about it is that teaching or learning should be teaching in this context. It comes from Ron Oliver. I'm confident many of you know the author and also later publications on quality topics, and it comes from Australia, available now through ResearchGate from Escalize. So if we look at the research that is dated in 2000, so 19 years ago, we already see very important directions and recommendations on how to ensure quality in online learning and higher education and distance education. So here we see design material for independent learning issues. We see learner positive response, personal understanding of new learning theories. We see new learning possibilities in technology based learning settings, meaningful concepts for learning, learning activities ahead of content, and support for long and authentic assessment and other important issues that we might identify in this Australian article. Then I traveled to Europe and I specifically chose MOOC as one of the peaks in 2013 published in Open Education Europe. And if we look at this article prepared by Guardia Lourdes, Mein Marcelo and Albert Sangra, MOOC designs principles and telepathic approach from the learner's perspective. I do believe that in Europe we now meet as a non formal or even sometimes informal learning case, online open learning offer. We can find also very interesting and useful recommendations in the article like competence-based design approach, empowerment, learning plan and clear orientation, collaborative learning and teamwork, social networks in personal learning environments, peer learning, peer resistance, quality criteria for knowledge creation, interest groups, assessment, PhD, bad media technology, enhanced learning software. There are a lot of important criteria that we already take as common knowledge and understanding today in Europe for the quality approach. And then of course I had to travel forward to the American continent, and I chose one paper from American Behavioral Sciences journal. I focused actually on aligning learning analytics with learning design, and I still think that we continually search on using learning analytics using data, but of course we have a lot of challenges today like physics and other aspects that we need to consider. What I also liked mentally in this paper is that here the authors already talk in 2014 how we should divide the scope of learning analytics application in learning design, and how learning design might provide framework for interpreting learning analytics as well as design for clinical learning for example, can investigate how learning analytics can help us to evaluate whether learning design is achieving its intended purpose. Further on in Europe and in Eden we had very successful project examples who were working on scaling quality criteria and practices in advanced learning on how to support authors of courses and how to support institutions on institutional level, on curriculum level, and then how to ensure that we don't lose track and continue with continuous professional skill development on identification of quality criteria for our practices, for our practices of applying technologies in education. So I know that such tools and criteria exist and we have a lot of good examples on that and we use them. But there are some principles that I would like to highlight and this would be the highlight of the presentation. The first of all is to learn some research that I just shortly presented and some practices from the projects in Europe that we had possibilities to experiment with and practice them. We see quality as a target optimized, negotiated and agreed by academic community, by learners and teachers, learning, eating, teaching and teaching were teaching with learning. And of course that they are all in the agreement with learning design in terms of consistency and negotiation. The second highlight is that we actually are and should be focused on peer-reviewed and collaborative approach. Institutionally wise and European wise and maybe global wise, we should think how we should foster collaboration on peer-reviewed of what we have and suggesting how we should move on with all our practices. A European proposal for this and European answer maybe to the question how to create and encourage this quality for online learning and higher education and different learnings will be open. I think this is the key where we started the first one and then we have a comment on to ensure the quality by having independent expert assessment including participation of the author in professional competition and with student engagement with content each other and their teacher online should be at the heart of learning design of materials and activities. So please these are the questions and comments in the chat when you reply to them. Yes, sure. The answer to Rado. I see this is an openness in terms of how teachers could be open for students to be engaged. I think this is one of the key questions. The practices that we have and the possibilities that the technologies allow us to definitely outline the agenda for us as teachers to create platform in our courses for students to create knowledge to generate collaboratively new ideas and to suggest students less curriculum. I think this is the way to create and I think we are on the way. If we open our experiences to college globally, European way, then we can do it immediately and we can definitely have good examples. The second question is about expert assessment. If we become experts ourselves. The last one from Anna Waite, student engagement with content and teachers. If we invite everyone to help us and collaboratively support us towards quality improvement, this is a good approach. If we have expertise for evaluation and assessment, I don't think this will lead us to any long-term success. And I lost the third question. I don't know if we have time to answer it. Thank you, Irina. Definitely going open, opening your work to others. The last question is slightly related to the first one. Think about what we are doing, what we are presenting and the comments we can get as well can enable us to be even better. So I thank you now with this question, with this challenge. We are now moving to the second presenter. Dean Hawke from USDLA. Dean is going to talk about how to protect respectable institutions and good quality programs from the fake ones. We know that today you could find on the internet relatively big amounts of fake online courses, online programs, diplomas. And Dean, what is your answer to that and how can we protect ourselves? Sandra, thank you very much and welcome from Bloomington, Indiana in the United States. This is a subject that traditionally the university faculty don't get into much, but administrators become increasingly worried about. The whole issue of fake colleges and fake credentials is hundreds of years old. And I am a bit of an expert almost by accident on this subject because of my involvement in getting involved in the accident stand all back in 2015. I'll get into that a little bit later. I cannot say I'm so astonished how big it is actually. The question is how big the problem is. I'm always surprised how big the proportion is. To give you a little bit of background. We have a question here in the chat. Some of you may have recently in an article discussed diploma mills and counterfeit operations. And this gives you a sense of scope. As you can see, he stated that he's been an expert in the field of 40 years and indeed he has he was involved in one of the largest. United States bogus schools in the 1980s and the 1990s. Yet, after even that breakup, there has he believes there's at least 5000 diploma mills in operation today, world one. And one of the parts that most people don't pick up on is that there are at least 1500 accreditation mills meaning associations that say that they accredited groups and what they're doing, of course. Is accrediting bogus universities. In addition, there's at least 500 counterfeit diploma websites people that'll sell you a degree. From any school, they just make a copy of it and do something. And there's review sites. It's a rather remarkable, by the way, a very profitable business. Our friends at WES, which is the world education services. Also state that this is a rather significant issue they about two years ago. We're able to identify 2615 so you can say that the numbers between easily 2500 to 5000. There are diploma mills. 1008 in the United States alone and that number is probably higher by the way the UK is the second largest group. And they state that the issue is at least $200 million in the US diploma mill business alone. And again, frankly, I think that's an underestimate of the issue. It's becoming more and more of an issue and it's an it's an issue, not only for students, but for the institutions themselves and employers. And we're seeing more and more of the media becoming involved in this. For example, you recently had on the BBC. There's a lot of documentary about the exit scandal and the fake universities and of course my favorite university Nixon University, which does not exist. And this was a part of a massive scandal that was hundreds of millions of dollars. And the BBC did a piece on this back in think just recently within the last year, if I remember right, a little bit of my involvement. I was involved working with Alphanar, which is a publication that is an Arab English higher education publication, by the way based out of London. I worked with their reporting team in identifying potential bogus universities in 2015 while I was out in the United Arab Emirates working for a university and then later becoming a higher education consultant. And at that time, we were going after a group called must university. And as this evolved Benjamin Plackett, who was their reporter. And I found out of course it was a much wider scale and at the same time, the New York Times was involved as separate investigation, and we all ended up in the same place, which was a group that was called access. Most of you don't know them but they are a Pakistani base group. They had 335 different higher education programs out there by various names, high schools and universities, all using lovely English sounding names from America and from the UK, made them sound legitimate. It was more than just that they had telemarketing teams located in at least 10 different countries. They also had in their safety box, when it was rated by Interpol. There was diplomas signed and United States documents signed by then Secretary Kerry and Secretary Clinton, as well as others to show legitimacy, which of course had all been faked. And then I began writing about this issue because I got involved accidentally. When I saw what I thought was a bogus news release. And which I contacted the accreditation group and they immediately tried to sell me a PhD. Because I was supposedly a smart guy, they were going to give it to me at a discount. How smart was that. And that's kind of what started a lot of this. And I began writing on this issue and has become rather a bit of a crusade for me ever since. Because even though we help bust some large groups. It didn't really stop it at all. It just slowed down one group. As you can see, this has been most people think of this as an Arab African type of issue and that's not true. They are one of many that are afraid upon but it's people that are desperate to get their degrees and people that at times are trying to take a shortcut. And while they shouldn't do that. This shouldn't be happening as well it also turns into a game of extortion, I must admit. So as you can see, even in the Gulf news they talked about it and other places so this is a worldwide subject. The question becomes, what can you do about it as universities and as the public. And with that, we started working on this and I was actually asked by Ministry of Interior to get involved in this for a while. And one of the things that we started trying to do and encouraging government to do is to begin prosecuting bogus schools and its leaders. It was a starting point. We were able to get the government's UAE's attention but also creates omens and others who began taking this issue more seriously. And as you can see, 50,000 while that is something 50,000 500,000 terms is like a fine of 133,000 US something like that. What it is about you and I think this is interesting is that now they're starting to sanction meaning clients of employers and recruiting firms who are putting a great deal of pressure on hiring people with certain degrees and at times get very involved in not checking the credentials of their own particular people. So you see more and more people with false degrees including medical doctors that have come into a country and I mean in any country with false degrees and government now is starting to look at new ways to go after that and sanctioning of the agencies and the employers themselves is becoming more prevalent. One of the things and one of the worst offenders of this is the people that make the money on this. And while I love these four companies and I use them a great deal. What they do to try to stop bogus schools is nothing. And in my opinion, it's pretty simple. It has to do with the economics, they make money off these and they can times indicate ignorance. We need to have these four media companies in particular began vetting advertisements from universities and rejecting the ones that have come from false groups. We also need to increase public awareness with the media, which I believe is happening more BBC, our chronicle times, etc. the English paper publications, they need to be doing this. But as most important is our own community. We need to be taking more of a lead and exposing bogus schools via the media and lobbying itself as associations. We do carry some power of persuasion and our associations number one need to bet out anybody who may be well there. And also to be able to at times become a source how I became involved in this as I was a source to help provide and expose some of these groups and our associations themselves need to be doing this more and more and being aggressive about it. It is a place where we can do good. And I think that is where I will stop. And I'll be happy to answer the question. They found out it's fake after some time some day. Thank you Dean. Thank you. Yeah, this is also I would say a question of honesty and decency. We have to take in consideration I would say the culture that is changing and that today we are sometimes forced to take some easy ways in order to preserve the jobs. But nevertheless, the issue of honesty is important. So yes, I agree with you. We should speak openly about this fake university program. Thank you very good questions. Let me answer the first one. Angela, there are groups that you can go on to their sites and who is a John bear I think is the one that is most well known in the United States. There's also another group I cannot remember their name right now they try to keep up with this even though the numbers are so big at times. They don't know what they probably do best to snow the groups that claim that they are creditors or certifiers. But if you punch in fake universities. Websites, you will immediately run into them, and they do provide good information. Sandra on your question. You know that's the one that's troubled me for a long time, but when I was involved in the accident scandal. I ended up talking with a number of these students, as I was investigating and involved in this, as well as some of the people that worked for acts, by the way, and there's a combination here. People who are desperate to improve their jobs and things and this is what I saw in the Middle East will try to take a shortcut and I think on the most part they do know. But I think they're trying to do it to get promotions and it's usually within a field that they already know that doesn't excuse them, but what it does is put them in a trap. And I say, Sandra that you decided that there was a new position and somebody gave you kind of a quote unquote easy way out and kind of made a moral justification for, and you spent some money to do it. What happens next is you're in a trap that you can't get out of. What happened is that they will call you after you've done it, maybe six months, maybe a year from then, and they say, we're having to move your degree to somewhere else and you start asking questions when you mean this is fake. And they say, well, there were certain problems with this group we didn't know it, but for another $5,000 will take care of this problem for you. And what if I don't. Well, then we'll inform your employer or the police and you'll lose your visa. So it becomes extortion. And, like I said, I don't think I talked to a single person that didn't say I didn't know. I think most of them said, I sort of knew but I was trying to take an easy way out. And while that's not good excuse, the people that extort people like this are the ones we should go after. But we start taking away some of those opportunities. Yeah, I agree with you. Thank you Dean. Please, other participants and presenters, please continue collaboration and comments in the chat. We are now moving to the next presentation from Jennifer Roberts from Open Distance Learning Association in Australia. We will talk about how to keep learner's attention on the course from the neuroscience perspective on effective strategy for students' engagement and creating a sense of belonging. So, Jennifer, one last comment on that very quickly is that Jennifer, we need to be aggressive about this, meaning in the public. They need to show who the focus ones are. They need to show the leadership as well as our own association. We have lost Jennifer. She had to come back to the room, so please give it a second. We are still waiting for Jennifer to come back or we have some technical issues. She has lost connection, so she's now re-logging into the room. Thank you very much and thank you to everybody for joining us this afternoon and I'm speaking to you from sunny South Africa in Johannesburg. And today I'm talking about creating a sense of belonging and I'm wearing two different hats here. My first hat is that of Vice President of Audla, which is the Open Distance Learning Association of Australia. And in addition, I'm a research professor at UNISA, which is the University of South Africa. So, according to research, students are concerned about three things. And that is the quality of the academic staff, their actual study program, and most importantly, a feeling of belonging. They need a sense of belonging. The sense of belonging is a basic human need. And according to neuroscience, physical pain and social pain use the same neurological pathways. And the language we use to describe social pain is the same as the language we use to describe physical pain. So what we're saying here is the sense of isolation or sense of social isolation can be as painful to a student as normal physical pain. I've recently returned from the ICDE in Dublin and one of the themes that came through very strongly was the sense of belonging and the sense of the eye, the sense of the person, the sense of identity that students need. If we look at it in context, we've got a couple problems. Distance education students traditionally work on their own and in isolation and we all know this and that's according to the transactional distance theory and various other things. So we've got students who are working in isolation. But there's research that shows that interaction treatments into distance education in courses impacts positively on student learning. So we're saying here by getting the students to interact it can improve their learning. So I want to check this one step further. Jennifer, we have lost you. Are you here? We have lost again Jennifer. Well, let's see if she can reconnect again. Okay. I hope she will manage. Come back. We have some technical issues. So Jennifer, are you back? Okay. I apologize for the problems with my Wi-Fi here. So if you're still with me then I can continue. So I was saying that distance education students traditionally work on their own. There's research that proves that interaction is important and one of the strategies that can be used is cooperative learning. So learning is a social process and knowledge is developed and negotiated between members is intertwined with personal and group identity. And here I think it's quite important to look at a few of the words. We're saying between members that is sharing and cooperating. It's intertwined with personal and group identity. Personal and group identity important. And Pella from Pratt suggests that the formation of online learning communities is what distinguishes online learning from simple correspondence courses and leads to enhanced student outcomes. The challenge there for us and for educators is to create a learning environment that supports diverse identities and experiences of students and fosters constructive and respectful dialogue and exchange. And here I want to just mention the diverse learning identities and experiences. And I'm going to give you an example here from my own university, the University of South Africa, which is a fully distance education university and we have close to 350,000 students. And let's look at, we always refer to non-traditional students in terms of various variables, but let's look at language and how variable that is. At UNICEF, only 19% of our students are native language speakers. So first language, English speakers. Many of them for English is actually their third or fourth language. And just to add to it, we actually have 11 official languages. And you've heard me correctly, we have 11 official languages. Our medium of instruction is English. So we can see just in our own student population that the variety of languages that we have. In addition, our age grouping is quite different. 56% of our students are under the age of 30. 15% of them are already over age 50. And in the next slide, there's a slight mistake that 62% are employed and the value of students are not employed. So we have a large number of students who are unemployed. Around the world we see most distance education students being employed and starting part-time. In our context in South Africa, the third of students, almost the third of students are actually unemployed. And again, as in Australia, we have a large rural community. And in these rural areas, they don't have access to learning centres, but we do in most cases have access to technology and Wi-Fi. So we're saying that distance education students are dispersed in terms of geography, language, age cohorts, etc., and therefore have differing points of view in terms of politics, world views and many more. And by exposing them to these differences in a structured, positive and constructive way, this is crucial. And here I'm emphasising a structured, positive way. And that's where cooperative learning comes in. It is not just putting students into groups and leaving them. It is structured and positive. Okay, learning can take place three different ways. First of all, we have individual learning, where the student is there for himself. He's there to learn to pass, get his degree. Thank you, Jen. Thank you, Jen. Thank you for a really, really good presentation. Please continue in chat, replying in chat on the comments and the questions. We have to go on. We are a little behind the schedule. So I will now ask Kiana-san, Kastana Munoz from European Commission Joint Research Centre, to give us presentation about how... I am back. I'm not sure my camera is working, but I am back. I'm going to try to stop. There we go. I apologise for this, but I haven't got too much more to do. So we're talking about competitive learning. And then, thirdly, we have cooperative learning, where we think or squirm together. Okay, so what is cooperative learning? It was put forward, theories put forward by the Johnson Brothers in the United States, and it's not a method of just going into groups. There are certain areas that are really important in cooperative learning. And one is that there is a facilitator involved. So the course leader, the facilitator of the course has to be involved. You're not just put into groups and left on your own. Your groups are heterogeneous. So we are including people in the groups from different languages, different cultures, different ages, different areas to bring that diversity to the group. But according to the Johnson Brothers for a cooperative learning group to be successful, there are five elements that are essential. And that's positive interdependence, promotive interaction, individual accountability, interpersonal skills, and group processing. So cooperative learning is students helping other students to learn, and it's not students learning on their own. So let's look at the five elements very briefly. Positive independence. This means that every member of the group use their role as part of the whole team. And this is where the facilitator comes in. Everybody has a role to play towards the success of the whole team. Your role is predesignated. You could be the timekeeper. You could be described. But you have a functional role, and everybody appreciates each role as much as the other. Promotive interaction, which I think is a very important one. And it's always been that you don't work isolated and do your little part of your project and then just come together. There is continuous face-to-face interaction, as it was in the early days. But I'm in discussions with the Johnson brothers, and we are working on research now that is proving that online interaction is just as effective as face-to-face. Individual accountability. Suddenly the group, each person has to succeed. Every individual learner has to succeed in order for the group to succeed. And if we go back to the neuroscience, one of the most important strategies for effective learning is teaching. So we have a group where one person is weaker than the others. The stronger people will teach them and get them up to scratch, and thereby enhancing their own learning. Group processing is incredibly important. Members learn to reflect on their own personal learning, as well as group functioning and metacognitive skills. And this ties in with what John Dewey says. We do not learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience. And your final one is it promotes interpersonal and small group skills, such as leadership, decision-making, trust-building, problem-solving, and motivation. So if we conclude it all together, we set the concern that students feel isolated. They want to belong. They're isolated for various reasons because of their different demographics. We have the technology to enable online communication. And one method we can use is cooperative learning, which leads to connecting students, promoting group identity, and improving learning. Thank you. I see there's one question here saying, how can student interaction be effectively promoted? And I think it can be effectively promoted when the students really understand the benefits. And there's so much research here. We have to teach them. We have to show a lot of people don't want working groups. It's got such bad connotations. But if we can prove the benefits in terms of the sense of belonging, in terms of the increased learning, then I think that's the way to go. And thank you. Definitely MOOCs are here to stay. And then they can take it and they can enhance your learning experience. We have some comments and questions in the chat. But basically, people are saying that we should leave the traditional classroom and face-to-face learning as one thing, and that online MOOCs are also good, but as an additional way of learning. Thank you. Welcome, everyone. Can you hear me well? Correctly here. Thank you. So following with the discussions, we have started our distance learning. I'm going to cover the topic about the future of distance learning, namely about the future of massive open online courses about MOOCs. Can I manage this? Okay. So it is clear that MOOCs have been growing during the last years. There are here some numbers. Currently, more than 100 million learners from the beginning and 1,000 courses. It's a lot. All in the last year, 20 million learners sign up for a MOOC according to the European MOOCs consortium. But on the other hand, they have been also signaled as a fact. So we don't know if they are going to stay with us in the future or they will go. In this presentation, I will explore some topics that can play a role to shape the future of MOOCs. For this, I will show some research results and some existing initiatives linked to each of the topics that we'll present. The first topic I'm going to explore is related to the providers. Why do higher education institutions or other providers do MOOCs, provide MOOCs? If we explore why universities engage with open education, it is clear that they declare that they want to increase the institutional visibility. This is one of the goals. Additional research also shows that it works. The institutions that offer MOOCs, next year, next academic year, they have more enrollments in traditional courses, not in MOOCs or in open education MOOCs. So why they should they stop offering MOOCs? Well, it would be possible that MOOCs are not effective tools for skill development. In fact, some research show that online learning does not work better than face-to-face learning instruction. Also, the research show that MOOCs have poor instructional design and it can be a problem for skills development. However, research also show that learners, their own, think that MOOCs are useful for acquiring skills. Some research that we have conducted here at the University Center show that workers taking MOOCs are more likely to remain employed in the future compared with these workers who don't take MOOCs. So they have a re-skilling capability. So we can conclude that they are a good tool for providing skills, even they don't have a very good instructional design. They can have also indirect effects. Teachers usually are a big, they participate a lot in MOOCs. They accept well this training format and MOOCs can be used for teacher development so as that they provide better teaching and they provide better skills. So they have an indirect skill, some provision of skills also. Another aspect that can configure the future of MOOCs is its recognition in formal education but also in labor market. Recognition is still a challenge. MOOCs offer several certificates and recognition options. Some MOOCs don't have certificates or the only completion certificates, there are the nano degrees, the series, programs, specializations and the more formal would be providing credits for MOOCs. For this usually payment and identity control is needed. One European initiative working to solve the lack of recognition of MOOCs is the common microcredential framework of the European MOOCs consortium. This framework allows the recognition of MOOCs by universities if the MOOCs meet some conditions. These are the conditions they have to be, they have to have a duration of 100 to 150 hours being the level 6-7 of EQF, half-assumative assessment, verify the identity of the learner and they transcript, certify the content, the learning outcomes, the hours, etc. Another maybe less specific initiative is promoted by the European Commission and is the European Universities Initiative. That initiative promotes the inter-university campuses, student-centered curricula and multidisciplinary approaches. It means that it opens the door to give some room for MOOCs recognition, but it's not a specific objective of the initiative. However, digital learning and MOOCs are mentioned as a priority area in education and skills for the new Commission. Another aspect that can save the future of MOOCs is the capability of MOOCs to improve access to the equation. For now, learners are privileged with higher education and mostly from Western countries. And one can question why, why this is the profile, the typical profile of MOOC learners. And there are some barriers that impede other subpopulations to participate in MOOCs. One is language and context, other is the variety of offer, the other is the availability of time and the competence, the competence of the learners. There are some initiatives that are dealing with this, so for language and context, for instance, we can find automatic translation projects, international collaboration. However, it is important to note that research that we have done here at the UN Research Center shows that there is some transferability, possibilities across different labor markets. So taking MOOCs produced in one country is also useful in labor markets in a different country always that they share the same language. For instance, Spain, Latin America, France, Africa, variety of offer and design. Another barrier is that MOOCs should offer different levels, not only higher education, use different pedagogies and have different designs. In some cases, including blended learning components. In this way, they should or would reach more, more variety of students. At the UN Research Center, we conducted a study called MOOCs for Inclusion, what we studied, how MOOCs can reach migrant centrifugees. And we concluded that there are several design aspects that are very important for migrant centrifugees and are not usually taken into account by mainstream MOOCs. A recent paper by Sara Lambert also shows how non-mainstream MOOCs are better suited for learners with low educational levels. So variety is very important for extending access to MOOCs. Competencies. European Commission defines eight key transversal competence and at least four of them are needed to participate in MOOCs. These are digital competence, learning to learn, competence, entrepreneurship and sense of initiative competence and communication in foreign languages if you want to take a MOOC in a different language. This is an employer graph that shows empirical results that shows how the highest and the highest is the digital competence of individuals, the more MOOCs they have participated in the past. In the European Commission and the joint research center we are working towards the development of some of those skills in Europe. We have developed some frameworks that define the competence and are useful for its further teaching and training. So we define the entrepreneurship competence, the digital competence, the life competence that is learning to learn competence basically. And we define conceptually it so as that it can be integrated in the curriculum. Well, another barrier is obviously time. Adult learners have a lot of time constrictions and research shows that workers do not have employers supposed when they take MOOCs. And normally it is individual responsibility to take MOOCs. Employees even don't know about the participation of employees in MOOCs. And obviously learners could appreciate actions oriented to the facilitation of participation of MOOCs on working time. It's very difficult to combine life, learning and work. So as conclusions, I think my personal opinion based on the research and the initiative that I have been explaining that MOOCs are not a fact because they are growing, because they are effective higher education marketing tool because they are effective skills development tool and they have room for improvement. In fact, MOOCs are dealing with the main problems that they are facing and starting to be more and more recognized by higher education but also by labor market. And they are starting overcoming barriers for reaching more individuals than the traditional MOOC learning. So the conclusion for this would be that MOOCs have future always that they are able to overcome the barriers that impede the growing. I would stop here. Thank you very much for your attention. Let me see what kind of MOOCs if you have attended. Some of MOOCs are recognized at work but let me ask you a question. A very good idea that we have recognized that we are going to recognize MOOCs as a way of education. Why do you think it takes time so that it becomes more recognized in higher education? Well, I think it will... I'm not expecting that it will take a lot of time especially if initiatives as European universities or the European MOOC consortiums start to work. In team, let's say, across universities that they can recognize and they MOOCs of each other. I think it's a matter of quality control and a matter of trust. You can take a MOOC but if the university where you want to get it recognized don't know about the quality, the vet is going to recognize it. So you have to follow the standard quality assurance mechanism so as to get it recognized. Once the quality is guaranteed, also the labor market will start recognizing it as a way of life for learning. Indeed, our research shows also that face-to-face training and MOOCs provide the same... they have the same impact on employability of persons, of individuals. For me, that was a surprise because usually face-to-face professional development is much more recognized than MOOCs but MOOCs are very useful for learning skills. They work for having a certificate until now for the moment but it seems that growing this direction, growing the quality will become recognized. I like the idea of 2050, not 2030 but 2050. So regarding your last comment on balance between different issues, what do you think how important would be the role of the government and the institution management in maintaining the new ideas but also to perceive the quality? Hi everybody. Christina, may I ask you to start this short video real possible now? What kinds of features do we want to see? Act the related climate change. Okay, thank you. So I know that last week there was a meeting of Eden Fellows at the ICD conference in Dublin on the 5th of November. On this particular topic, unfortunately, I couldn't join this meeting and probably I'll get some feedback from you after I make a brief presentation of the new UNESCO initiative. This is a global initiative, Futures of Education Learning to Become. This initiative was launched in September and now we are in the pilot stage. The first stage is pilot consultations. Then there will be online consultations, high-level consultations and in parallel our team is doing research on the futures of education. So this initiative is aimed to reimagine how knowledge and learning can shape the future of the humanity and the planet. So this is within the values of our organization. The initiative will generate an agenda for global debate in a world with increasing complexity, uncertainty and precarity. The International Commission will work under the leadership of the President of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the first meeting of this commission will take place in January 2020. So between September and December we are working to provide some preliminary ideas and thoughts for this commission. And the members of the International Commission are the sort leaders from the world of politics, academia, the arts, science, business and education. So the broad and open consultations will involve youth, educators, civil society, government, business and other stakeholders. And now I'll probably provide some more information. So as you learned from the video, the horizon for the... We don't use here the term for site, but the future, the study of the futures. The horizon is 2015. And we are speaking about the futures of education in Blue Row because to acknowledge that there are multiple dimensions of the future and they can be very desirable and undesirable futures as well. Consultations will be held across all regions of the world and the project will have an iterative and collective approach to generate discussion and action on the role of education, knowledge and learning. Actually the first phase of research within this project have already reviewed several external trends affecting, for example, higher education. So widening gap in demography between developed and developing countries, population shifts through increasing globalization and migration, digitization, shifting labor markets, environmental threats, the political instability, increased levels of armed conflict. And there are internal trends affecting higher education rapidly expanding enrollments. Actually globally females participate more in higher education but less so in natural sciences. There is an increasingly complex set of providers. There is increasing privatization, growing diversification, growing internationalization, increasingly costly higher education system, etc. So in the past our institute has an experience in working in futures, in studying the futures and we publish the book on futures for higher education and ICT changes due to the use of open content. So certainly this project will involve, include many aspects related to education, different levels of education, different forms traditional and non-traditional issues related to recognition of learning outcomes obtained using traditional and non-traditional forms of education, MOOCs, digital competences, etc. So just to mention a few questions to be asked How to balance the different types of skills that higher education should impart for adaptability in the future? How to balance skills with values and ethics? How to balance the human resource development function with education for citizens and peace? How to balance common public and private good function of higher education? How to balance knowledge on local and global realities? How to balance teaching and learning organized through human concept and automated learning? So I would like to invite all of you to join the consultation within this UNESCO initiative. Thank you very much. Although lots of governments swear that education is top priority I can testify from my own country that usually it's only political decision but not concrete action. So let's hope it will be better. Please join the others in the chat with comments on the topic or topic. Let's move on now to the last challenge we are going to present today. With us it's Taylor Reynolds who will present EduHack project from the perspective of how to help teachers to be digitally competent and to provide innovative and interactive learning environment. So what we have been talking previously by Cetlana future of education and so on so you're actually going to give some replies on that. In some countries education and in particular higher education is decentralized and autonomous but in many countries it is regulated as a project. Can you tell me for example how many teachers or academic staff have passed through this project and correctly it's already third year of the project? How many of them have already passed through the project and what is their feedback on possibilities to attend the courses, participate in the hackathon and so on? Very good. Thank you very much Sandra and thank you to Eden and to you for allowing me to join. It has been a very interesting webinar this afternoon. I hope you can hear me okay, can you? My question is... I don't think we by any stretch of the imagination can say we can answer all of the questions we've been talking about but one that is relevant to us is the question of how to help academic staff to improve their skills and their resources and so I'd like to spend a few minutes with you describing a European project called EduHackU which as you can see from the screen is all about capacity building for university educators, academic teaching staff who want to develop their skills. We're coming into our last year of the project we would like to expand our network and to share our materials with you which is what this short presentation is about. So you can see the partners on the screen and know that this is funded by the Erasmus Plus programme of the European Commission. EduHack is based on a supportive learning approach that is of course open, collaborative, active and so far as that we support our learners, our academic staff to experiment, create and reflect themselves and it's based on what are sometimes caused in new literacies. The framework for digital competence that we have based our work on is the DigiComp-Aju framework. A little bit earlier you heard Jonathan talking about JRC's DigiComp framework. This also comes from JRC and it's the educational framework and we've based our work very definitely on this framework in order to make it a little bit more systematic. What we're offering through this project is first of all a freely available online course made up of 19 standalone modules which are available on the website. I'll give you the address in a moment. They're currently available in English, Spanish and Italian which we would love to have them available in other languages. We're looking for partners to help us to develop them in that direction. We also provide a toolkit providing advice and organising EduHackatons with academic teaching staff and these are events whereby academic staff come together in a short period of time in order to create something together whether that's an element of a course, a digital approach to accreditation and new resource, whatever. We also include guides, sample materials and advice. There's also an online wall and hub available through EduHack and access to an open network of peers and fellow collaborators. This is a screenshot as you can see of the access to the online course which has been divided into these four areas, digital resources, teaching, assessment and empowering learners and each of these separate parts of the course then have their own separate modules. This is a typical one. This is one exploring digitally supported assessment strategies. Each of these modules has got an element to read, an element to watch, a piece of video to watch and then something active that we invite our participants to actually do so that they have an active learning opportunity themselves. One of our partners has already taken their academics through the full cycle with the EduHack materials and that's Junier in Spain and they began with an online course offer to their academic teaching staff for a period of approximately two months whereby their academic staff took part in, took themselves through the various different courses and took part in several webinars. They then prepared a hackathon whereby they worked in groups online in order to identify the topic of activity of the hackathon. Again, a webinar was linked to that and then they carried out the hackathon over a period of a couple of days. Seven ideas came out of this and they worked in groups. This is the overall structure of what we like to offer for academic staff to try out. This is to give you an example from the EduHack community hub whereby various topics are tagged so that this one is primarily in Spanish whereby you can, if you are an academic using this course materials taking part in the hackathon then when you post online you can be connected up with others who are posting and using the same tools and trying out the same digital experiences. This is an overview of the structure of the project whereby the hub which is at the centre of what we're offering to academic teaching staff which is a knowledge sharing platform is available and then feeding into this are the various different activities which universities carry out themselves, and I think what I really wanted to highlight in this short presentation is the fact that we're now heading into the third year of this project and we've launched an informal network so this is by informal we mean that it's not a network that you pay a registration fee to join, it's not a formal network it is an informal network of peers and people who are interested in similar activities to ourselves from universities and colleges in different parts of Europe and outside Europe as well. The purpose of this network is to maintain these learning experiences going forward particularly when the project ends in the years time to promote the use of these materials supporting a community of users perhaps extend the approach to for example making the online resources available in languages other than English, Spanish or Italian and the advantages to being a member of this informal network is that you will receive regular updates from us and certainly for this last year of the project we partner with the support and advice which we would like to apply a similar approach to upskilling the competences of your academic teaching staff in your university or college. So my last slide just simply to give you the addresses so first we'll talk a little bit more about the project that's the web address at the top which you'd like more information and the application form and the addresses there as well you can see already which universities and networks have changed the system for the network so I asked you now in chat these are the questions topic we have talked about what do you think is the biggest challenge which we are going to deal with in 2030 so definitely there are all challenges and issues very relevant and highly important but what would be your what do you think is the biggest one which is we are looking forward to 2030 so first please put your opinion in the chat we have set way back you have frozen you know I know the new movie from looking at this from the partners because we have comparison with partners so far my question was do you think there's approximately 150 academic staff members they don't have to follow the course every single module they can now we are going to conclude I will give my presenters floor for minutes for each presenter to conclude and maybe to highlight what they think is the most important issue relating to the topics they have present maybe some message for the future so I would like to start with Irina and then Dean what do you think how would you like to conclude the session with the message maybe regarding the topics you presented thank you Irina good food for thought great question I thought just to say I think quite a the every university is running some form of training course some form of training support for academics so in many cases it does already happen the question is to whether should we look at the tree or not this entity a very sensitive brand and also a country we also have to look at whether we try to offer this something to see by everybody just a natural part of the process now I am giving floor to Jennifer and then to Stislana for their conclusion I think it should be Jennifer is very good Stislana began her education you already got very good introduction by Jennifer I think them to improve their education skills what you do with academic competition for several years so now we are going to Jonathan and after that to Sally so MOOCs are here to stay credentializing is very important we have already said individualized learning pathways quality of learning materials and distinction between take and real one so Jonathan what is your presentation you had thank you we have introduction to Sally digital competition individuals who have their individuals for futures themselves and society members and therefore I think it would be a great challenge for us to find different approaches to quality assurance for each individual perspective and each future of education thank you this has been a very interesting session so thank you for organizing this today from my perspective about quality programs from fake ones it's been a problem for a long time it is one that has a tendency to be hidden and not talked about so it comes up occasionally the reality is that we are having people who are getting fake degrees who are in very high positions and in positions where we are talking literally life and death in terms of nurses medical and other things we need to as institutions as employers to be more vigilant about this to truly check credentials and to prosecutes and to be very public about it we'll never get rid of it all but the more we speak about it and the more we are public about it the more we can we can lessen the damage but I would emphasize that I think employers need to be much more involved in this as well as the universities to protect their own institutions and their brands thank you very much okay just from my side I think we all know about the movie what women want but I think we need to concentrate on what do students want and I think the research has shown strongly that students want a form or a sense of identity a sense of belonging and I think we are very fortunate that we have the technology now to provide that but as educators as lecturers we have to buy into that ourselves first and understand and accept and know the value of interaction and group work and cooperation and collaboration it starts with us because if we can't provide that sense of belonging to the students it's never going to work so it's a challenge out there to all education providers to accept the views of the coverage of learning experts and to understand ourselves that we can be out there for the students thank you very much so we have come to the end of our session today I would like to thank my presenters Govoli from America, South Africa well I think that we had very interesting webinar today and this is related to the quality of online materials the quality of skills obtained by students and well I was really impressed by the presentation by Dean about the bulk of various universities and diplomas and certificates and actually some measures should be taking and we should foresee or develop some actions to make the certification more reliable did I forget someone but ok let's see that we have different challenges ahead of us we provide this really good examples about these challenges and how to overpass them, how to look forward to fight with these challenges I also thank all the participants for really engaging discussion in the chat and participation I invite you to further attend the seminars I think for the future it will be very important the competence that individuals that learners have because in the future it's going to be a lot it's going to coexist a lot of different learning options open, closed and ecosystem and it's very important that the people have digital skills, self-regulation skills learning to learn skills to take advantage of all the existing course it will allow also to distinguish about the quality of the courses individuals are a quality controller very good if they have the skills to do it it will allow to interact online also if you have the digital skills and interactions skills would be more easier to get benefits from the online learning so for me it's very important to develop competences that individuals can use to benefit in this ecosystem so if you have a question about the future of distance education universities also the session is recorded it will be posted on the eBEN web if you have registered so the session you will receive an open batch I just think listening to the discussion about quality is kind of a bad quality time I think for me quality is a part of the structure as in our area academic staff are really self-critical and self-reflective and really look at themselves and how they present and how they lead the next process but it's quite difficult to talk to them about incredible competences I'm always amused by the number of times you ask an academic person just to simply record themselves and to watch the video after oh no I can't possibly do that and I'm not saying everyone should be watching themselves on video all day but it's just the ability to look at yourself to examine how it is how you are teaching how you set up your learning environment for your students how you could improve that interaction that personalisation that was mentioned by Jennifer until this time as we really have that as something as a key competence that our academic staff and all of us have I think it's very hard to talk about quality